NO ANTISEMITISM

Combating Antisemitism — Medium’s Opportunity To Do The Right Thing

Medium’s link to X/Twitter should end

NB: When you’ve read this story please see the discussion in the comments from Tony Stubblebine, Brittany Jezouit, and me.

• X/Twitter is a social media platform rife with antisemitism and many other forms of hate.
• Medium and its writers tacitly support X/Twitter’s antisemitism by maintaining a close relationship with the platform.
• We — as individual writers, and Medium as an organization — have the power to end our tacit support for antisemitism on X/Twitter by ending our association with the platform.

Fortune.com reported this alarming information:

Please read the story for full details, but the article alleges that:

• In the months following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, antisemitic tweets more than doubled
• During a time when big tech companies did ever more to curb hate speech, Twitter — once Musk took the helm — went in exactly the opposite direction

Musk’s support of antisemitism

Then of course, there’s the Musk tweet in support of a dangerous antisemitic falsehood.

Musk tweeted “You have said the actual truth” in response to an antisemitic tweet that stated “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

Musk could have remained silent. He also could have refuted the statement. Given that he’s one of the planet’s most influential individuals, people would have listened to his rebuttal.

Instead, what the world heard was an immensely powerful man AGREEING with a blatantly antisemitic statement.

This is not the free speech absolutism Musk claims to support. Rather it is overt antisemitism atop antisemitism, fueling the fire of hatred by supporting hate speech.

In the days following Musk’s hate-filled comment supporting another’s hateful stance Musk was condemned by the White House. Multiple large companies pulled ads from X/Twitter.

Kudos to them for doing so.

Medium can do the same.

Medium can lend its strong voice to that chorus by performing a similar act and severing its X/Twitter link.

I understand that I lack the perspective of those in Medium’s leadership about why such a close relationship exists between Medium and X/Twitter.

I also understand that hate speech and antisemitism infests every corner of the Internet and likely every social media platform.

That does not mean we at Medium should support antisemitism by remaining linked to a platform that has become a cesspool of antisemitic hate and one that is led by someone who supports it when he could, and should, easily do otherwise.

A call to action

• If you’re an individual on X/Twitter please cancel/deactivate your account. Send a strong message that antisemitism will not be tolerated.
• To Medium’s leadership — Adrienne Gibbs, Ariel Meadow Stallings, Buster Benson, Tony Stubblebine, Alex Benzer, Brittany Jezouit — please do the same, on a grand scale. Show that you refuse to support antisemitism. Leave X/Twitter behind.
• Medium’s “share on Twitter” function should end.

I’ve made this point once before

And the response was tepid at best.

We can and should do better. The rising tide of hate must end.

Zulie Rane, Robin Wilding 💎, Tim Denning, Casey Botticello, Vice President Kamala Harris, Jerry Seinfeld, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, The Democrats, Joe Biden, Michael Moore, Sinem Günel, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama — Please lend your voice to this effort.

Thank you for reading.